33 Statistics Summarizing the Year 2017 in Public Relations, Content Marketing, Social Media and SEO

Many of the posts published here are heavily weighted with surveys and reports. There are a couple solid reasons behind this approach.

First, I think data provides a wide canvas of the happenings in the industry. It’s good to know where and how other marketers are finding success.

Second, pouring over such reports is a great way to stay smart, relevant and maintain a competitive edge. Writing is thinking, but more than that its the application of thinking; it transforms a passive activity into an active one. We are after all forever students of marketing.

In the continuing effort to put a bow on content this year, I went back through each of 80 posts published this year pulling out interesting statistics and linking back to the original piece.

In the process of building this piece, I tried to group these into categories people might find helpful. Those categories are:

Content marketing statistics

PR and media relations statistics

Social media marketing statistics

Paid media and advertising statistics

Marketing measurement statistics

Search marketing and SEO statistics

And here we go…here are the benchmarks from 2017.

Content Marketing Statistics

1) How long should a blog post be?

The average post today is 1,142 words long but it’s clear that blog posts are getting longer – 41% longer than the typical post three years ago.

PR and Media Relations Statistics

9) Even advertisers want to invest in PR.

“Sixty-two percent of respondents answered that they planned to increase internal public relations staffing over the next five years and a full 75 percent said they planned to increase overall spending on PR over that same time period.”

“More than half of consumers – 57% – say they buy or boycott brands based on the brand’s stance on a social or political issue…Additionally, 65% of ‘belief-driven’ buyers will not buy a brand if it stays silent on an issue they feel that it has an obligation to formally address.”

“But then the researchers took a closer look at CEO apologies, specifically—16 out of the 29 cases. They found that when an apology was delivered by a CEO who looked sad, the company’s stock price actually rose post-apology.”

Jason Miller of LinkedIn said, “one single employee sharing three items of content a day can add up to 23 million in additional reach over the course of a year. It can add up to 60,000 additional occasions when people engage with your content.”

Ahrefs says it crunched petabytes of data to show “that almost 95% of newly published pages don’t get to the Top10 within a year. And most of the ‘lucky’ ones, which do manage to get there, do it in about 2–6 months.”

About Sword and the Script Media, LLC

Based in Atlanta, Georgia, Sword and the Script Media, LLC is veteran-owned public relations agency immersed in the business-to-business (B2B) marketplace. We focus on building consistent, sustainable, repeatable, and process-driven programs for PR, content marketing and social media. A defining difference comes down to our approach – that marketing ought to have utility. This is because marketing that helps, sells better than marketing that hypes.